Listen to the Wind . . .

I had a dream the other night that the Sierra Club had taken over the country and had decreed that henceforth only its native-born members would be allowed to remain.

I saw America’s millions streaming into Mexico and Canada, prodded along by booted environmentalists wearing clothes from the Banana Republic and armed with bottles of Evian water.

They prodded and harassed the refugees--some of whom pushed wagons loaded with precious personal belongings like exercise equipment and lap-top computers--and swarmed over the nation’s airports and waterfronts, overseeing the evacuations there too.

In other areas, planes dropped leaflets urging those still in hiding to surrender and promising to give them $100 each and a new suit of clothes from a Penney outlet if they came out now.

Helicopters with loudspeakers repeated the message and further explained that the Sierra Club had nothing

personal against the immigrants, but if Yellowstone and Yosemite were to survive, they had to leave.

When one man, chased across Tuolumne Meadows, cried that he was more important than a snail darter, the two Sierra Club Envirocops who arrested him only smiled at the poor man’s delusion and threw him into a truck with the others.

I was an immigrant in my dream, the Great Che de Guerra, and went underground to make war on the Sierrans and their Ultraenvironmentalism. Our Motto: “Save People, Chop Down an Ecologist.” Our logo: a dolphin with a spear through it.

I was amassing an army when I woke up.

*

“That must have been some dream,” my wife said, eyeing me suspiciously. “You were moaning and waving your arms.”

“I was Che de Guerra,” I said, wiping away the perspiration.

“And who was the woman, Conchita Banana?”

I explained it was a dream of combat, not eroticism, and when I went into detail we both suddenly realized its source: a Sierra Club announcement that it would vote next month on whether to declare war on immigration as a way of protecting the nation’s environment.

While the very idea can cause nightmares, I am still trying to deal with it in a cool and rational manner. I can’t help my dreams. As a psychiatrist once told me, they are produced and directed on a higher level. DreamWorks, maybe.

Advocates of population control within the Sierra Club want to limit immigration by about 80%, thereby cleaning up the air, purifying the water, protecting the granite mountains from being worn down to a pebble and generally creating Heaven on Earth right here in the Good Old U.S. of A.

By the way, that includes immigrants from everywhere in the world. Contrary to popular belief, they do not all come from Mexico.

That the Sierra Club would undertake such a referendum among its 550,000 members is rooted in the success of California’s Proposition 187 three years ago, which declared its antipathy toward illegalimmigrants (one word), and the subsequent glee with which that success was greeted.

Even Bill Clinton, riding westward to Hollywood on his favorite fence, declared his intent to Strengthen America’s Borders. How much more support did the immigrant-bashing Malthusians in the Sierra Club need?

*

This is weird stuff to me, a Sierra Club member. All along, you see, I thought the purpose of the club was to protect the environment for the people, not turn its existence against the people.

I asked my favorite environmentalist about this. Milt McAuley has been walking our mountains for 35 years, photographing and sketching the plants, mapping the trails and writing books about them.

Five years ago he was named to the national roster of the Sierra Club’s 100 “Environmental Heroes” for his work in promoting and preserving the Santa Monica Mountains. At 78, he’s still out there.

McAuley isn’t quite sure what the club is up to either or whether it should even be involved in population control. “We’ve always been a country for people to come to,” he said the other day. “When we’re out cleaning trails, I don’t ask where anyone’s from. I don’t care.”

The club ought to be taking a global view of the population explosion, McAuley says, and not simply slam the golden door on immigrants to this country.

He’s right, of course, but I’m not sure that the intellectual capacity of the Sierra Club membership is truly global in nature. Does it really understand that there’s more to environmental protection than standing at the gate of a national park checking green cards? We’ll see.

For instance, a lot of people have been climbing Mt. Everest lately and many more are lining up across Nepal to join the crowd. At best, due to all the stomping and ice-picking, Everest will be worn down to an anthill within the next million years or so. At best, there’ll be a new, higher mountain next to it composed of beer cans, frozen bodies, empty oxygen canisters and pizza wrappers. Maybe the Sierra Club ought to set up an entry gate there too.

When John Muir (an immigrant from Scotland) founded the club more than a century ago, he indicated his intent to preserve the wilderness for all the people. But in at least one instance he expressed doubt that the people would understand its message. He wrote: “The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language too faint for human ears.”

By voting to take the low road to save America’s environment, the Sierra Club would be indicating that it is no longer even trying to listen to the wind, but instead is heeding the voices of a rabble that preaches a new and hateful brand of national protectionism.

My fear that this might be so prompted a second dream. It was of a group of Sierra Club Envirocops standing atop Half Dome with John Muir. They were pushing him off.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com